BY HARLAN CHAPMAN-GREEN
Only Watch is the bi-annual charity auction designed to raise money for research into Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. I’ve written that a lot recently, but it’s okay as I only have to write about the bi-annual charity auction bi-annually. It must also be nice for the watchmakers so they’ve got some breathing room to create something truly unique. That does make me wonder what the folks at Zenith were thinking of when they decided to submit four coloured variants of the same watch to this year’s auction.
The Chronomaster Sport was divisive when it came along a few years ago, I know that first and second hand because I got to review it and you all had it out with each other in the comments section. I’ve since warmed to its presence, especially now that Zenith has made some new versions in different metals (the two-tone and solid gold models are particularly endearing), but I’m not 100% sure about these colours.
Zenith is presenting a blue, green, yellow and red version of the Chronomaster Sport, these are the main colours of this year’s Only Watch auction for reference. Each watch has a lacquered dial with slightly darker overlapping subdials and a colour-matched ceramic bezel. Zenith says this is the first time they’ve ever used yellow or red ceramic on a watch. While that puts them quite far behind the LVMH-owned contemporary Hublot, it is nevertheless a big step for them.
All the watches are based on the standard Chronomaster Sport that I linked above, so I won’t go too much into the specifics of wearability on the wrist or the movement here. You should know that all of these are 41mm in diameter with a thickness of 13.6mm and all the cases are made of stainless steel. All the watches also have the calibre El Primero 3600 inside, one of the latest iterations of Zenith’s iconic high-speed (5Hz) self-winding chronograph movement.
I just wonder what the point of these was. I can understand someone having a couple of the same types of watches such as a Submariner and a Planet Ocean or Seamaster PloProf because those, while doing the same job, are very different watches. Maybe there are plenty of people out there telling Zenith they must colour-match their watch to their trainers or something. Or, perhaps the selling point for these is the fact that Zenith is throwing in a weeklong stay at the UTS Tennis Academy in Nice, France, with training from Patrick Mouratoglou who trained, among others, Serena Williams for a decade.
The expected retail price is between 45,000 and 55,000 CHF, but these will probably sell for double when the time comes.
